Athlon XP 2100 getting too hot, and I need advice.

[alanhall4]

When I turn on my computer my processor temperature starts somewhere around 40 degrees celsius, and then it will slowly rise until it gets as high as 86 degrees. I've been using this computer for about a year with the retail heatsink/fan. I've never had any stability problems, but these high temperatures are really starting to worry me. The case temperature will start out at around 30 degrees celsius and maybe rise to about 45 degrees.

I have 3 80mm fans, and two that were just installed, but that doesn't seem to be helping anything. Should I buy a new heatsink/fan for the athlon, or do you think that I can do something to fix the one that I have. I'm not really interested in overclocking, so I just need the temperature stable and reliable.
Here's my system. Is it possible that the temperature sensor is malfunctioning? Another weird think is that the fan is only running at about 3000 rpms most of the time, and it can do quite a bit more than that. If the temperature is that hot, why isn't the fan working harder.

Antec Performance Plus 660 case
Antec 350w smart power supply
Athlon XP 2100+ with retail heatsink/fan
Gigabyte 7VRXP 1.1 motherboard
MSI Geforce Ti4600 video card
Audigy sound card
Aims Lab Xtreme 98 tv card
Pioneer 16x DVD-Rom
Plextor 24x burner
Western Digital 120gb hard drive
100 mb ide zip drive
floppy drive

Any information or advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

 

[thraxes]

what kind of case do you have and are ther any case fans mounted?

 

[alanhall4]

Oops I forgot that. I have an Antec Performance Plus 660 with 3 case fans mounted.

 

[magomago]

How is the airflow? Where are your fans and which way are they blowing? It seems that you might be creating a vaccumm with the improper flow of air...

 

[alanhall4]

I have two fans in the front of the case blowing towards the rear with one fan next to the processor blowing air out of the back of the case.

 

[lameaway]

Check the thermal contact between your heatsink and CPU. Did you remove any protective plastic strip before you installed the heasink?

 

[Ketchup]

Sounds like bad temp sensors. Your CPU should only rise 10-15 degrees between idle and load, and your system should only rise about 5 degrees. You might wanna take off your heatsink and make sure there is a nice thin layer of thermal compound and that the heatsink is making good contact with the CPU. Your CPU would be fried if it hit 86, so I know that is inaccurate. I know TV tuner cards get extremely hot, so that may be the source of some of your problems.

 

[alanhall4]

lameaway,
Yeah, I removed the plastic strip when I installed. I'll try to take the heatsink off, and see if I can get a better contact. Is there any secret to getting the heatsink off. I'm having a little trouble and I don't want to damage anything. Thanks for the help.

ketchup70,
I was hoping that the sensors were just bad. I've seen somewhere that AMD just says that the temperature must be under 90 degrees. The TV card actually doesn't get very hot to the touch, but I'll try taking that out and see if it makes a difference. Thanks a lot.

 

[thraxes]

If you can get a small digital thermometer take some readings with that. Use a piece of tape to stick the thermal diode directly next to the CPU core. That's how I measured the temps in my P3 machine with good accuracy.

 

[NokiaDude]

Try touching the heatsink when the monitor says the CPU is around 65C. If it's hot then try blowing out all the dust with a cheap $5 can of compressed air. Its 10x better than blowing yourself or vacumming. Then if that doesn't help, then you should look into a new heatsink and fan combo. Maybe an SLK-800 is in order!